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Using Oracle GoldenGate for real time data replication and integration.

Sep 23, 2016 / Posted By:Robert Buda

Oracle GoldenGate is Oracle’s best-of-breed, strategic solution for real-time data replication and integration. It offers a rapid, robust and low-overhead approach for moving small or large volumes of transactional data between diverse operational and analytical systems—including not just various Oracle Database versions but also non-Oracle databases like SQL Server, Sybase, IBM DB2 and others.

Though extremely powerful and flexible, Oracle GoldenGate is straightforward to install and configure. Its transformation, filtering and custom processing features make it suitable for a wide range of use cases, including:

Data warehousing and analytics/decision support

High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) scenarios

Database loading and migration

One of our DBA consultants has been working with a complex, mission-critical, enterprise-wide GoldenGate implementation that illustrates how much you can do with this offering. It is being used to enable a “Know Your Customer” application, where data is replicated in real-time between production and DR (“hot-hot”) sites. The client opted to use GoldenGate over Oracle’s physical standby capability because they needed read-write access at both sites.

GoldenGate replicates data among four main regions and three satellite regions worldwide in a complex, multi-master source/target architecture. Data can flow in real-time from any site to any site. Intercontinental and regional data restrictions mean that sensitive data must be masked before sending it out of some regions. This requirement ruled out most competing solutions, which provide only storage-level replication with little flexibility for transforming or filtering the data in between sites.

This implementation also leverages GoldenGate’s DDL replication support, which further supports high availability. Anytime a table is created or modified, the DDL (and hence the modified data) is replicated across the topology. For even greater data reliability, the implementation has been extended via a “self-healing” agent that identifies any data inconsistencies and attempts to fix them automatically, with no human intervention.

As you can see, GoldenGate has a very flexible architecture. It can handle many data extraction/transformation or conflict resolution scenarios out-of-the-box or with minimal customization using built-in functions. It plays very well with Oracle RDBMS, and offers endless possibilities for writing custom PL/SQL functions or native C language routines to get the functionality you need.

Click Here to find out more about Oracle GoldenGate use cases and benefits, and how to get started.